Seeing Silicon: Cosplaying with fibre optics and servos
Fans are increasingly using techniques in 3D printing, animatronics and new materials to build elaborate cosplay homages
The end of the year brings one into the mood of pageantry and what better than dressing up as your favourite manga, anime, game or sci-fi character? It is with this celebratory mood that this self-confessed geek enters the hallowed halls of Fan Expo in San Francisco, a local but popular fan expo which attracts thousands of fans, sporting store-bought to custom-made costumes.
The ground floor has stall after stall of merch to buy, while the comic creators and actors sit on panels on the second floor, signing autographs and taking paid-for selfies. I beeline to the second level, where a red-carpet event runs full throng. Hobbyist cosplayers display their latest costumes to hoots, cheering and thunderous clapping by the audience. There are superheroes, characters from manga and anime and some from games that I can’t recognise. I do cheer them though.
Cosplaying is the ultimate celebration of fandom for it combines two strong emotions in us. The desire to playact, to disguise, roleplay and the passion of being a fan, of having an idol you want to emulate. Though costuming and masquerade has been a thing in most civilisations, cosplaying in its modern sense started in 1970s with Japanese fandom dressing up as manga and anime characters in their everyday lives – at colleges and conventions. Today, it’s a huge market of costumes and wigs valued at $4.8 billion in 2023 according to Future Market Insights. There’s an estimated 10-15 million cosplayers in the world, who spend about $500 per person yearly.
One of the fans on the red carpet is Lisa Mei Ling Fong. She’s dressed up as a Tatooine Tusken Raider from Star Wars series. She brings along a gigantic beast of burden, an imagined creature called bantha, a mix of a yak-horse-elephant, a Tatooine native, rising beyond her height. Fong’s been working on her cosplay companion for seven years now, using self-dyed raffia skirting, palm fronds and synthetic hair, pouring in details, money and time. “I stopped counting after 250 hours,” she says, handing me a blue-milk bottle as a souvenir (Bantha milk is blue, she tells me). Another cosplayer, Will is dressed up as Moon Knight, a character in Marvel comics. He ordered his sculpted body armour at a 3D print shop online and wrapped lots of cloth on it to make it look ‘real’.
Most characters that are popular with fans are fantastical, making it hard to copy in real life. This makes cosplay an art of putting a puzzle together. Scrounge vintage stores, create patterns for 3D printing, add in fabric, stitch, and add in pieces, paint, prime, coat and etch – all to try and copy a fantastical character’s costume from a game or a comic.
Alita Battle Angel from the Japanese cyberpunk manga series greets me on the ground floor. This is Poppy Lop Cosplay (@pollylop_cos) one of the invited guests at the expo. Poppy got into cosplaying early 2021 and has made between 30-40 costumes in the past four years. “I probably average one costume per month,” she laughs, adding that a dramatic competition piece might take her a few months to do. New materials like EVA foam, thermoplastics and foam clay have changed the way cosplaying works though, she says.
“EVA foam is craft foam that comes in a variety of thickness and makes it easy to make armours and props,” she says. It’s lightweight, can be covered with fabric or painted to add detailing. It’s also affordable and accessible. A couple of years ago, costumes were made of clothes from the thrift store, floor mats and carpets. Now it is EVA foam and more expensive thermoplastics like Worbla, which are malleable as you can heat it and reshape it in the design you want. Lots of cosplayers cover their EVA foam with Worbla to give it more structure, though that adds weight too. “You can print crazy shapes with it, which is pretty awesome,” says Poppy, who was eyeing LEDs and motor-activated things to experiment with.
Next to Poppy, sits Loveable Spiral (@lovablespiral), another expo cosplay guest, elegantly wearing the Senator Padme Amidala from Star Wars. She created her armbands on Tinkercad, a 3D design software and printed it in her garage. Reduced costs of 3D printers (starting at $200) mean a lot of hobbyists can keep one at home. “I’ve seen cosplayers weave fiber optics into fabrics and make dresses out of them. I want to learn how to do that,” she says, adding that like her, most cosplayers have self-taught themselves through tutorials, social media posts, Discord and Reddit channels. “Everyone starts somewhere, so if you want to get into cosplaying, just do it.”
Fibreoptics, LED lights, animatronics – with cheaper computers like Raspberry Pis and your average remote-controlled servos, everyone wants to add a bit of sci-fi to the costume.
As if on cue, an R2D2 appears right before me and I follow it around the corner. At the stall of Bay Area Droid Builders, I find hobbyist Robert Stevenson the maker of this droid. It’s a squeaky bit of delight, carefully constructed by Stevenson over five years by pouring hundreds of dollars and days. It’s a replica of a robot, he tells me. He used a 3D printed body, basic code with remote-controlled servos to make the bot move and speak in beep-bops.
“The electronics have been the hardest thing because I want them to work in a specific way, but they don’t,” he says, adding that many cosplayers are curious and want to use electronics in their costumes. An animatronic on their shoulder, a camera, some movement that you can code, stick to servos, add in LEDs, fibre optics and make the costume look alive and autonomous. Add in a touch of magic smoke. “I keep tempting them to come to the beep-bop side,” he laughs. Posing for a couple of selfies with his all too clean, all too squeaky delightful R2D2 homage, I head out into the chilly evening.
Fans, I find out, come in all shapes, sizes, and genders. They can be tiny humans accompanied by adults, or cosplaying octogenarians shakily navigating the crowds. There’s one thing in common. Their eyes sparkle with the thing they’re geeking out. When it’s festive season, that’s a good thing.